So your rant about the lack massive number of dependancies is really just a straw man.
Not a straw man. Using apt-get, you go do a new install of evolvator-2.9.5-RC2. It sucks down ten new packages and fifty updates to existing libraries. But thirty existing apps need to be updated because of those updates, so you need to suck them in as well. They might bring in other changes of their own. And the probability is high that you might just end up with two incompatible applications that cannot live together in the same system. All without compiling a damned thing.
I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries
Anything taken to an extreme becomes absurd. Back when GNOME followed the "don't ever write a new piece of code" philosophy, it sucked. Thank goodness they've started getting over that.
But it's still a pain. Try building a GNOME desktop by hand. No apt-get, no ports, no emerge. It's up to you to find all the requisite libraries in exactly the right versions so they'll fit together. It's maddening.
Code reuse is good. But it's not a religion. What started happening to GNOME, before they stopped it, was that there were dozens of libraries that did 90% of what they wanted, with dozens more to do the various remaining ten percents, with quite a bit of overlap. It was like building a structure using bits from erector sets, lincoln logs, legos and bionicles, with liberal amounts of silly putty. Sure it got built, but the build engineers started going insane.
I have mixed emotions on this. When you go home to visit your parents, and their roof is leaking, and you're not a roofing repair man, you STILL at least take the time to take a look at it. If the toilet is plugged, you haul out the rooter and see what you can do, even though you're not a plumber. You help vacumn, wash the dishes, and mow the lawn.
So why shouldn't you help with the computer when they have a problem?
But what if you were a plumber, and every time you crossed the continent to visit your parents on the opposite coast, you had fix and maintain the plumbing over three to four hours of your limited time with them? If it were me, I would start to resent it. Are there no plumbers on their side of the country? Or what if you were a professional automechanic, and three to four hours of every weekend with them you had to change their oil, tune their engines, and wax the cars?
I don't mind helping my friends and family out when they have computer problems. But I am starting to get very annoyed with some of them when each and every time I visit I am immediately presented with a long list of things to fix on the computer.
When I haven't seen my mom in six months, and the first words out of her mouth when I visit are "oh good, you're here, I've got a list of computer stuff for you", I get just a little bit peeved. I'm not being petty. I get peeved in EXACTLY the same way she used to get peeved when I arrived home between college terms with half a dozen loads of unwashed laundry.
So how do you communicate with someone who's not online or using a different service? Can you leave messages with people who aren't online? With people who are using a different IM service?
Thanks for the comment. It's an unpopular opinion on this pro-Linux site. HOWTO's are like recipes. If you have all of the ingredients in the right quantities, they work. But if you don't you're stuck.
Example: I just bought a new laptop for my post-Christmas present to myself. Installing FreeBSD was a snap. But I can't get USB working at all under Linux (Slack 9.1). Off to the documentation I go, and discover a hodgepodge of conflicting information. They're all in the form of "do x, y and then z". But the steps don't work, with no clues in the docs as to why not. I don't know enough about "why" USB works in Linux to figure out what's wrong. Am I missing a kernel module? Do I need to edit something related to hotplug? What do I look for in dmesg to get some clues?
You're approaching FreeBSD from the wrong direction. At the risk of over-generalizing, the problem is that Windows, Linux and FreeBSD people approach problems in three different ways.
Windows people want to know "what". What do I do to use a digital camera? What are the exact steps I need to take to make a picture I just took with my camera be my desktop wallpaper? And don't leave out any trivial steps, or I'll get confused. A good example is my mom. She doesn't know how to use Internet Explorer if it isn't running in a maximized Window. And even though she knows how to save a document she wrote, she doesn't know how to save a document someone sent to her in the mail. Although my mom is an extreme example of Windows users, I've seen similar attitudes amount highly experience Windows developers and administrators.
Then there's the Linux approach. It's focused on the "how". Witness all the HOWTO's polluting the documentation space. While a much better approach, it's still limiting. The Windows user is stuck with eating out at restaurants and ordering take out food, but the Linux user has a recipe book, so they can cook their own food. But if there's a recipe they want that's not in the recipe book, they're still stuck. That's your problem. You're searching the Linux recipe book (newsgroup after newsgroup) for a recipe on how to use digital cameras.
The FreeBSD (and traditional UNIX) approach is "why". Why do we do what we do when we mount a filesystem? When we know that, then we know how to use a digital camera. Because it's the same damned thing. We don't need a recipe book with ten thousand recipes for ten thousand different kinds of bread. All we need is a primer on baking bread. The rest we can figure out.
Notice your use of the phrase "sure, that's an easy command, once you find it". You're looking for a specific recipe. A specific HOWTO. A FreeBSD user would say "that's an easy command, once you know why." The "why" is that a digital camera is a filesystem. So you mount it just like any other filesystem. If you don't want to type in the resulting command each time you use the camera, then do the same thing you do with all your other automounted filesystems, use an automounter! It's no different.
My Olympus C740 is UMass. My brother's Canon A70 is UMass. They both are "plug-n-play" under FreeBSD or Linux. But that's not necessarily the case under pre-XP Windows.
Whilst the above steps might seem trivial to the experienced users, you have to admit it's not the kind of intuitive setup proccess you would reccommend to your grandma.
The comparison was being made with Linux. Granted, Linux has made some strides recently. But look back just one year ago. Under FreeBSD you just mounted your camera like it was an everyday filesystem. Under Linux you had to get special software, wade through reams of imcomplete HOWTO's, cross your fingers, clench your buttocks, and hope it worked.
Whilst win32 is a joke to advanced users, you generally plug in supported hardware, and it just works.
Yeah right. And I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn...
Over Christmas vacation I was visiting my mom. Her computer was Win98SE. USB mass storage devices are supported by the OS. Plug in my thumbdrive and it works. But plug in my camera and it goes off into neverneverland. Even though my camera is a standard UMass device. I had to download the camera's USB drivers for Windows before it would recognize it. But I didn't need any special software under FreeBSD.
Actually, Qt under OSX can use a native look and feel. I don't know whether this uses genuine native widgets, or emulates there look. But that's beside the point. If you look at the screenshot, you'll see that it is NOT using any standard Qt styles, but instead a standard KDE style. Ergo, a plain vanilla kdelibs is being used.
Your stupid DRM laws won't apply to us, the rest of the World. We don't care for them. We'll buy non-DRM hardware and run non-locking software on top of it.
And what makes you think US residents won't do the same? If congress thinks the mere passage of a law will cause people to fall into line, they're ignoring over two hundred years of their own history. And if they think they can enforce their wishes by arming legions of DRM police, they're definitely smoking crack.
Just because enlightened France can ban websites or progressive China can put up a national firewall, it doesn't follow that the US can get away with shoving "government-approved" harddware down its citizens throat.
No one should have to choose whether or not to say something religious.
The only way you're going to be able to shield your child from all displays of religion great or small, is to lock them up in a closet until they turn eighteen. Of course, such a strategy is absurd, so many people resort to lobbying for the banishment of religion altogether from public dispay. But this is an equally ludicrous solution. Your children are going to be exposed to beliefs that differ from yours, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. So you need to grow a thicker skin and accept that it will happen.
Speaking of the Pledge of Allegiance, I went to school with several children who were not allowed by their parent's faith to say it, chief of which were the Jehovah's Witnesses. They didn't seem to be under stress. They simply didn't say it. No one pressured them to go against their parent's wishes. This wasn't in some liberal bastion of enlightenment, but in deep rural conservative America thirty years ago.
If you don't want your children making that choice, then tell them not to!
I agree. I have no problems with a distro choosing one desktop or another as the default. And I have no problems with a distro moving the other desktop off of the first CD image. But removing it entirely, so that the user who wants it must grab it elsewhere, is boneheaded.
At least include Qt and the core KDE libraries! If they had chosen KDE instead of GNOME, do you think they would banish GTK+? Of course they wouldn't!
But this is coming from the Debian camp. Though not officially Debian, Bruce was a long time Debian developer. Debian wouldn't distribute the kdelibs back during the "controversy", even though none of the contentious issues touched the LGPL kdelibs. They just didn't want KDE. Not all of the Debian developers, to be sure. Most of them are great people. But there were a significant number of Debian developers who didn't.
The politics of Debian are strange and convoluted. I fear that UserLinux will inherit them.
And when was the last time you had to dodge a street corner preaching athiest? Or toss into the junkmail pile, the latest athiest tract taped to your door? I suspect the answer is "never".
The answer is indeed "never". But I have had to dodge people handing out political tracts, and have had to throw them away when taped to my door. I've also had to throw away pizza coupons taped to my door, and dodged people standing on the corner asking me to sign a petition.
...but it is quite interesting how unreligious LOTR is, despite the piousness of Tolkien.
LOTR is a fictional prehistory mythology. There's no Catholicism in it because the tale it tells predates Catholicism by tens of thousands of years.
But his Catholic piousness still shows through brightly. The morality that Tolkien portrays is done with a very broad brush, so it's no wonder that the fine details that would explicitly label it "Christian" are missing. But some points to consider:
There is only one God, Eru, and the Valar are merely angels. No one worships the Valar because Catholics do not worship angels. The only Valar that is worshipped is the fallen Valar Melkor, by the "heathen".
There are saints. Earendil is one. Frodo's departure to the Valinor is a kind of beatification.
Chastity. Arwen Undomiel remained a virgin for thousands of years, waiting for the right guy to show up. Would a Scandanavian or Saxon epic do the same? If Aragorn were Odysseus, he would have banged every wench from Bree to Minas Tirith.
The nature of evil. Whole books could be written about Tolkien's portrayal of evil, but it definitely has Catholic overtones.
The books are definitely "unreligious" in their lack of organized hiearchical churches. The religion presented in the books is extremely informal. There are no religious ceremonies. No one goes to mass. But much the same could be said of the Chronicles of Narnia.
Religion is merely the trappings of faith, and LOTR has faith in abundance.
No one's stuffing Christianity down your throat, (especially here in America).
One thing you need to realize in this life is that everyone is different. You will need to grow a thicker skin if you are to avoid being offended by seeing people different than you. That some of these people advertise their differences more than others is beside the point.
A Salvation Army kettle on the street corner shoves nothing down your throat. The Mayor's Prayer Breakfast shoves nothing down your throat. An fish bumper sticker shoves nothing down your throat. Even the evangelist knocking at your door shoves nothing down your throat, because you can always say "go away" and shut the door.
You don't have the choice of living in a world where everyone believes exactly the same as you, but you do live in a world where your "throat" is your own.
I said development for the Solaris desktop. Currently that's still CDE. Will Lesstif apps transparently link to Motif libraries? I'm not sure, but I could be wrong.
In fact, I can't think of any major apps that don't comply.
Xmms off the top of my head. It doesn't even have a main application menu, only a popup menu. TAB doesn't traverse all the controls in the options dialog. Etc, etc, etc.
I'll bet that the tool set the developers use is barely detectable in that mix.
Bingo. Give the man a prize. In the last six months my company paid for $3500 of classes for me. They'll pay an additional $2000 in the next six months. They don't even blink at this cost. That's just the expected continuous education.
Recently I spent three weeks writing a configuration dialog in Motif. With Qt I could have had it done in one. Heck, I prototyped it in Qt!
One of our embedded products is based on Windows. The developers of that product require $2000 of tools on TOP of the workstation and OS. The company doesn't even blink at this cost. But that's not all! That doesn't include the training in those tools. Or their support.
If that still doesn't convince you, we spent $60,000 last year for GNUPro support. Support for Free Software! Imagining that companies aren't going to choose UserLinux because they might have to pay for a Qt license if they write proprietary applications is just plain silly. For the price of the proprietary Qt license they get the support.
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So your rant about the lack massive number of dependancies is really just a straw man.
Not a straw man. Using apt-get, you go do a new install of evolvator-2.9.5-RC2. It sucks down ten new packages and fifty updates to existing libraries. But thirty existing apps need to be updated because of those updates, so you need to suck them in as well. They might bring in other changes of their own. And the probability is high that you might just end up with two incompatible applications that cannot live together in the same system. All without compiling a damned thing.
I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries
Anything taken to an extreme becomes absurd. Back when GNOME followed the "don't ever write a new piece of code" philosophy, it sucked. Thank goodness they've started getting over that.
But it's still a pain. Try building a GNOME desktop by hand. No apt-get, no ports, no emerge. It's up to you to find all the requisite libraries in exactly the right versions so they'll fit together. It's maddening.
Code reuse is good. But it's not a religion. What started happening to GNOME, before they stopped it, was that there were dozens of libraries that did 90% of what they wanted, with dozens more to do the various remaining ten percents, with quite a bit of overlap. It was like building a structure using bits from erector sets, lincoln logs, legos and bionicles, with liberal amounts of silly putty. Sure it got built, but the build engineers started going insane.
I have mixed emotions on this. When you go home to visit your parents, and their roof is leaking, and you're not a roofing repair man, you STILL at least take the time to take a look at it. If the toilet is plugged, you haul out the rooter and see what you can do, even though you're not a plumber. You help vacumn, wash the dishes, and mow the lawn.
So why shouldn't you help with the computer when they have a problem?
But what if you were a plumber, and every time you crossed the continent to visit your parents on the opposite coast, you had fix and maintain the plumbing over three to four hours of your limited time with them? If it were me, I would start to resent it. Are there no plumbers on their side of the country? Or what if you were a professional automechanic, and three to four hours of every weekend with them you had to change their oil, tune their engines, and wax the cars?
I don't mind helping my friends and family out when they have computer problems. But I am starting to get very annoyed with some of them when each and every time I visit I am immediately presented with a long list of things to fix on the computer.
When I haven't seen my mom in six months, and the first words out of her mouth when I visit are "oh good, you're here, I've got a list of computer stuff for you", I get just a little bit peeved. I'm not being petty. I get peeved in EXACTLY the same way she used to get peeved when I arrived home between college terms with half a dozen loads of unwashed laundry.
OO is the sole open source application that currently stands up to the proprietary competition. It would be great if it could be improved further.
Fine, go improve it. Improve it to your heart's content. Be happy, be free.
But don't tell others they can't go improve other open source office tools.
So how do you communicate with someone who's not online or using a different service? Can you leave messages with people who aren't online? With people who are using a different IM service?
Thanks for the comment. It's an unpopular opinion on this pro-Linux site. HOWTO's are like recipes. If you have all of the ingredients in the right quantities, they work. But if you don't you're stuck.
Example: I just bought a new laptop for my post-Christmas present to myself. Installing FreeBSD was a snap. But I can't get USB working at all under Linux (Slack 9.1). Off to the documentation I go, and discover a hodgepodge of conflicting information. They're all in the form of "do x, y and then z". But the steps don't work, with no clues in the docs as to why not. I don't know enough about "why" USB works in Linux to figure out what's wrong. Am I missing a kernel module? Do I need to edit something related to hotplug? What do I look for in dmesg to get some clues?
Actually, "ps -ef" works just fine under FreeBSD. Although why I would want to use some tainted SysV nomenclature is beyond my comprehension.
/etc/init.d because /etc/rc.d is so clearly superior.
p.s. We don't use
You're approaching FreeBSD from the wrong direction. At the risk of over-generalizing, the problem is that Windows, Linux and FreeBSD people approach problems in three different ways.
Windows people want to know "what". What do I do to use a digital camera? What are the exact steps I need to take to make a picture I just took with my camera be my desktop wallpaper? And don't leave out any trivial steps, or I'll get confused. A good example is my mom. She doesn't know how to use Internet Explorer if it isn't running in a maximized Window. And even though she knows how to save a document she wrote, she doesn't know how to save a document someone sent to her in the mail. Although my mom is an extreme example of Windows users, I've seen similar attitudes amount highly experience Windows developers and administrators.
Then there's the Linux approach. It's focused on the "how". Witness all the HOWTO's polluting the documentation space. While a much better approach, it's still limiting. The Windows user is stuck with eating out at restaurants and ordering take out food, but the Linux user has a recipe book, so they can cook their own food. But if there's a recipe they want that's not in the recipe book, they're still stuck. That's your problem. You're searching the Linux recipe book (newsgroup after newsgroup) for a recipe on how to use digital cameras.
The FreeBSD (and traditional UNIX) approach is "why". Why do we do what we do when we mount a filesystem? When we know that, then we know how to use a digital camera. Because it's the same damned thing. We don't need a recipe book with ten thousand recipes for ten thousand different kinds of bread. All we need is a primer on baking bread. The rest we can figure out.
Notice your use of the phrase "sure, that's an easy command, once you find it". You're looking for a specific recipe. A specific HOWTO. A FreeBSD user would say "that's an easy command, once you know why." The "why" is that a digital camera is a filesystem. So you mount it just like any other filesystem. If you don't want to type in the resulting command each time you use the camera, then do the same thing you do with all your other automounted filesystems, use an automounter! It's no different.
My Olympus C740 is UMass. My brother's Canon A70 is UMass. They both are "plug-n-play" under FreeBSD or Linux. But that's not necessarily the case under pre-XP Windows.
Whilst the above steps might seem trivial to the experienced users, you have to admit it's not the kind of intuitive setup proccess you would reccommend to your grandma.
The comparison was being made with Linux. Granted, Linux has made some strides recently. But look back just one year ago. Under FreeBSD you just mounted your camera like it was an everyday filesystem. Under Linux you had to get special software, wade through reams of imcomplete HOWTO's, cross your fingers, clench your buttocks, and hope it worked.
Whilst win32 is a joke to advanced users, you generally plug in supported hardware, and it just works.
Yeah right. And I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn...
Over Christmas vacation I was visiting my mom. Her computer was Win98SE. USB mass storage devices are supported by the OS. Plug in my thumbdrive and it works. But plug in my camera and it goes off into neverneverland. Even though my camera is a standard UMass device. I had to download the camera's USB drivers for Windows before it would recognize it. But I didn't need any special software under FreeBSD.
By definition, a good OS will recognize peripherals automatically
Then I guess there is no "good OS"...
Actually, Qt under OSX can use a native look and feel. I don't know whether this uses genuine native widgets, or emulates there look. But that's beside the point. If you look at the screenshot, you'll see that it is NOT using any standard Qt styles, but instead a standard KDE style. Ergo, a plain vanilla kdelibs is being used.
Give them some time. Geez...
Your stupid DRM laws won't apply to us, the rest of the World. We don't care for them. We'll buy non-DRM hardware and run non-locking software on top of it.
And what makes you think US residents won't do the same? If congress thinks the mere passage of a law will cause people to fall into line, they're ignoring over two hundred years of their own history. And if they think they can enforce their wishes by arming legions of DRM police, they're definitely smoking crack.
Just because enlightened France can ban websites or progressive China can put up a national firewall, it doesn't follow that the US can get away with shoving "government-approved" harddware down its citizens throat.
No one should have to choose whether or not to say something religious.
The only way you're going to be able to shield your child from all displays of religion great or small, is to lock them up in a closet until they turn eighteen. Of course, such a strategy is absurd, so many people resort to lobbying for the banishment of religion altogether from public dispay. But this is an equally ludicrous solution. Your children are going to be exposed to beliefs that differ from yours, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. So you need to grow a thicker skin and accept that it will happen.
Speaking of the Pledge of Allegiance, I went to school with several children who were not allowed by their parent's faith to say it, chief of which were the Jehovah's Witnesses. They didn't seem to be under stress. They simply didn't say it. No one pressured them to go against their parent's wishes. This wasn't in some liberal bastion of enlightenment, but in deep rural conservative America thirty years ago.
If you don't want your children making that choice, then tell them not to!
I agree. I have no problems with a distro choosing one desktop or another as the default. And I have no problems with a distro moving the other desktop off of the first CD image. But removing it entirely, so that the user who wants it must grab it elsewhere, is boneheaded.
At least include Qt and the core KDE libraries! If they had chosen KDE instead of GNOME, do you think they would banish GTK+? Of course they wouldn't!
But this is coming from the Debian camp. Though not officially Debian, Bruce was a long time Debian developer. Debian wouldn't distribute the kdelibs back during the "controversy", even though none of the contentious issues touched the LGPL kdelibs. They just didn't want KDE. Not all of the Debian developers, to be sure. Most of them are great people. But there were a significant number of Debian developers who didn't.
The politics of Debian are strange and convoluted. I fear that UserLinux will inherit them.
And when was the last time you had to dodge a street corner preaching athiest? Or toss into the junkmail pile, the latest athiest tract taped to your door? I suspect the answer is "never".
The answer is indeed "never". But I have had to dodge people handing out political tracts, and have had to throw them away when taped to my door. I've also had to throw away pizza coupons taped to my door, and dodged people standing on the corner asking me to sign a petition.
...but it is quite interesting how unreligious LOTR is, despite the piousness of Tolkien.
LOTR is a fictional prehistory mythology. There's no Catholicism in it because the tale it tells predates Catholicism by tens of thousands of years.
But his Catholic piousness still shows through brightly. The morality that Tolkien portrays is done with a very broad brush, so it's no wonder that the fine details that would explicitly label it "Christian" are missing. But some points to consider:
There is only one God, Eru, and the Valar are merely angels. No one worships the Valar because Catholics do not worship angels. The only Valar that is worshipped is the fallen Valar Melkor, by the "heathen".
There are saints. Earendil is one. Frodo's departure to the Valinor is a kind of beatification.
Chastity. Arwen Undomiel remained a virgin for thousands of years, waiting for the right guy to show up. Would a Scandanavian or Saxon epic do the same? If Aragorn were Odysseus, he would have banged every wench from Bree to Minas Tirith.
The nature of evil. Whole books could be written about Tolkien's portrayal of evil, but it definitely has Catholic overtones.
The books are definitely "unreligious" in their lack of organized hiearchical churches. The religion presented in the books is extremely informal. There are no religious ceremonies. No one goes to mass. But much the same could be said of the Chronicles of Narnia.
Religion is merely the trappings of faith, and LOTR has faith in abundance.
No one's stuffing Christianity down your throat, (especially here in America).
One thing you need to realize in this life is that everyone is different. You will need to grow a thicker skin if you are to avoid being offended by seeing people different than you. That some of these people advertise their differences more than others is beside the point.
A Salvation Army kettle on the street corner shoves nothing down your throat. The Mayor's Prayer Breakfast shoves nothing down your throat. An fish bumper sticker shoves nothing down your throat. Even the evangelist knocking at your door shoves nothing down your throat, because you can always say "go away" and shut the door.
You don't have the choice of living in a world where everyone believes exactly the same as you, but you do live in a world where your "throat" is your own.
Sheesh, what's next, A Wrinkle in Time?
Awesome! I can't wait for it to be released.
So you're saying a key component of the UserLinux distribution is the involvement of PROPRIETARY software development companies?
p.s. You don't need to release proprietary software in order to provide service and support for free software.
Or use GCC and Lesstif.
I said development for the Solaris desktop. Currently that's still CDE. Will Lesstif apps transparently link to Motif libraries? I'm not sure, but I could be wrong.
In fact, I can't think of any major apps that don't comply.
Xmms off the top of my head. It doesn't even have a main application menu, only a popup menu. TAB doesn't traverse all the controls in the options dialog. Etc, etc, etc.
Convince me I'm wrong. Give me a freaking quote from the book. Heck, from any of the LOTR books, not just Return of the King...
I'll bet that the tool set the developers use is barely detectable in that mix.
Bingo. Give the man a prize. In the last six months my company paid for $3500 of classes for me. They'll pay an additional $2000 in the next six months. They don't even blink at this cost. That's just the expected continuous education.
Recently I spent three weeks writing a configuration dialog in Motif. With Qt I could have had it done in one. Heck, I prototyped it in Qt!
One of our embedded products is based on Windows. The developers of that product require $2000 of tools on TOP of the workstation and OS. The company doesn't even blink at this cost. But that's not all! That doesn't include the training in those tools. Or their support.
If that still doesn't convince you, we spent $60,000 last year for GNUPro support. Support for Free Software! Imagining that companies aren't going to choose UserLinux because they might have to pay for a Qt license if they write proprietary applications is just plain silly. For the price of the proprietary Qt license they get the support.
VMWare has a GUI? Maybe I'm missing the whole point of what VMWare is.